Datacenters as core infrastructure of urban AI

Abstract

We imagine artificial intelligence (AI) in the glow of smart screens, self-adjusting traffic lights and seamless digital services. However, the true engines of this new urban age sit in vast, windowless buildings, humming at the edge of our cities. These datacenters consume enormous amounts of energy, shape where investment flows, and quietly determine who holds power in the digital city. If we care about fairness, sustainability and democratic control, we must stop treating the ‘cloud’ as intangible. The future of our cities depends on confronting the hidden infrastructure that makes urban intelligence possible. As datacenters enable urban AI, this Perspective argues that datacenters must be understood as core infrastructures, whose spatial distribution, governance arrangements, computational labor and economic logics reorganize urban space, redistribute power and externalize material costs, raising key challenges of energy justice, data sovereignty and civic accountability.